Crouch

I am eagerly anticipating my trip to China. Leaving tomorrow, I'm trying to collect my thoughts about the country and it's culture, as well as my own thoughts coming in. I honestly don't know what to expect: I have heard a great deal of things, just little pieces of a puzzle I have yet to piece.

I have heard great things about the country and it's capabilities to achieve great things, organize and mobilize people and resources to accomplish it's goals. The Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Expo, numerous developments and restorations since the cultural revolution, the fantastic urban cities; are all part of this picture that sells China as a growing and sophisticated nation knocking on the door of the first world.
Yet, the environmental degradation, economic disparity between the very rich and poor, the cover-up of the undesirable policies and conditions of the government and it's people, the costs of rapid development; those are things that I (as well as anyone who has kept an eye on world politic) would also paint into this picture.
The country is facing a dilemma of identity: a capitalist economic policy with a non-democratic state, a land of traditional culture in the arts, building, agriculture ,music, landscape and literature is being replaced or juxtaposed with new ideas from developing nations and a rapidly industrialized urbanization that places the majority of Chinese residents in cities.
Edward Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes (2006) is a fantastic movie for exploring what Man's relationship is with the environment he interacts with. Through his documentation through photography, China is portrayed as a fantastic landscape full of industry and consequence: the portrayal in the documentary proposes that these landscapes are not good nor bad. Rather, it is beautiful, it is at a scale where Man is marginalized ,and it exists. It is this movie that convinced me that Landscape Architecture is a field forth studying, and also aggravated my sensibilities, to learn more about Man's relationships with Nature.

I'm hoping to get a feel for what China is all about. the Next two weeks will be a time of documentation, observations, and hopefully knock-off Nikes and good food. fingers crossed.